›› Rules of HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) provides for seven rules sets what directly affect any medical practice. These rules sets are issued by the Department of Health and Human Services in the form of NRPM (Notice of Proposed Rule Making). Every practitioner, big or small, is mandatorily required to be HIPAA compliant and must comply by the standards of security and privacy of medical transactions and records. The provision of HIPAA cover each and every part of the medial practice including the billing software.

HIPAA has provided for uniform list of codes to be used for all items of medical billing and other purposes and all HIPAA compliant software must uses these fixed set of codes to ensure uniformity in electronic transfer of data from one entity to another. The software you purchase and use must comply with the regulatory framework provided by HIPAA and must produce all reports required by HIPAA. The software must provide secured access to patient’s data only to authorized personnel and must ensure safe and secured backup on HIPAA compliant servers. HIPAA provides for regulations which control how organizations would deal with the patient data, how they would allow access to the patient, recording and preservation of the medical history and documentations, and all other patient related transactions.  

The HIPAA compliant software must be open enough to for future expansion by additions of new modules so that the core modules need not be changes depending upon size and requirements of your operations. The main and most important aspect of any HIPAA complaint software is the security of data. All data must be encrypted using the most secure algorithms possibly Triple DES. Most computer engineers will tell you that there is no such thing as perfect security in any computer, but your HIPAA compliant software must ensure the maximum possible data security using the most complex encryptions algorithms using the longest possible key as the best possible and practical speed.